Hi, can any one recommend a good but affordable laptop modem card for me Dell Inpsiron 7500? It can with one of those unusable winmodems. Rudy

taken from : http://www.coralys.com/linux/dell7500.shtml

PCMCIA fax/modem: ActionTec Datalink 56K

Since I was not planning on spending too much on this I had my eyes set on the Dynalink 56K fax/modem card which does support Linux. However I found that my local store had another card for the same price, only this one was "multi-country". After several fruitless efforts to find out whether their pc card was a real modem or a host/soft modem I talked to my local shop and they said I could try it out and get my money back if it didn't work with Linux, so here it is.

This is an ActionTec Datalink 56K PC Card, I bought the international version which is equivalent to the "netglobal" cards (multi-country support) and goes by the model FM560LKI.

The FM560LKI supports V.90 and K.flex with its Lucent chipset and is flash programmable (software upgrades). It can be configured to operate in many countries and has digital line protection.

As it turns out (I am glad about it) it is not a winmodem. Although the box says "Windows modem" which was kind of scary, and that both the ActionTec and Lucent sites have no information about that, it works fine under Linux. I got connection speeds of 50K which my external modem seldom gives me.

Setting it up was quite easy, I plugged in the card before booting and examined the output (or see it again with dmesg. It was automatically recognized. Although the boot message says it is ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq=4) is a 16550A the actual device was /dev/ttyS0 (one zero!) which I was able to verify with minicom. What I found confusing is that the boot message also shows a tty01 at 0x02f8 (irq=3).

To make things short, it was automatically recognized during boot, it is managed by the PCMCIA serial_cs driver. Using the lsmod command showed (only relevant parts):

%lsmod
serial_cs 3696 0 (unused)
pcmcia_core 39720 0 [serial_cs ds i82365]

So I only had to create a symbolic link of /dev/cdrom to /dev/ttyS0. Something to watch out though, make sure the modem initialization string of your program is not set to ATZ once sent the modem will stop responding!. I have experienced this odd behaviour with other modems as well, instead I set it to AT S7=45 S0=0 L1V1X4&C1E1Q0.

Now you are ready to configure your favourite PPP connection manager, I personally use X-ISP but will probably switch to KPPP, seems to work fine as well.

The fax part is a Class I fax but I have not tested it yet.

Also check http://www.linux-laptop.net/...there are a couple more entries for this notebook.....

enjoy